Lo Sfoglino
Hi, I’m Richard, and I’m a sfoglino (the Italian name for a person who rolls out pasta into a sheet called the sfoglia).
I was born in the very north of Italy to British parents, and while we moved back to the UK when I was only 5, Italy has always been in my heart – I studied Italian at university, spending a year in Bologna, and a few years after graduating I bought a flat in Abruzzo where I lived for a year teaching English.
While I’ve always enjoyed anything food-related, I came to it fairly late as a career. After 15 years working in media communications, both in the UK and in Vietnam, I was burned out and looking for a change. This led to me working as an artisan baker, first at Revel Bakery in Rugby and then delving further into the world of sourdough at Corner Cottage Bakery in Kineton and Leamington
After picking up a copy of ‘American Sfoglino’ by Evan Funke , perhaps the best pasta maker in the US, I bought a mattarello, rolled my first sfoglia and fell in love with the art of making pasta the traditional way.
In 2023, I returned to Bologna to do a 3-day beginners course at the Vecchia Scuola Bolognese (VSB), recognised as the best school to learn rolling pasta by hand, run by Alessandra Spisni and her daughter Stefania, multi-award winning sfogline.
At the beginning of 2025, I was lucky enough to be accepted onto the Professional course at VSB, a program that only accepts 8 students a year. For 6 days a week for 3 months I, along with my classmates Sarena and Kato, rolled hundreds of sfoglie to turn into a multitude of different shapes as well as learning about the day-to-day of running a pasta lab.
Graduating as the first British person to have gone through the program, I’m proud to be representing the UK in the global community of sfoglini
